The only reason we’re having this vote is because of the organisations charged with embodying the collective will with regard to First Nations people. If the institutions of government were working properly there wouldn’t be any reason to have a Voice because the wishes of the subject people would be referred to management naturally in the normal course of events. The problem is that the message from the ground isn’t making its way up the food chain, and senior managers are just doing what they want regardless of the needs and wants of the people for whom the programs are run.
Having worked in organisations from 1985 to 2009 I am not surprised. It’s the job of managers to implement top-level policy, not to listen to the people working on the front line. Usually the two things are at odds, and it’s no surprise to learn which wins out in the relevance stakes. Because these organisations work in a vacuum, and the only people who actually know what’s going on are people working in them, the decisions of the top brass are not questioned.
What a Voice could do is hold the top leaders to account. Normally what happens is that occasionally a Senate enquiry opens up debate to the public, or if something major goes wrong we get a royal commission. These bodies have the power to coerce people to appear and answer questions put to them, and often parts or all of these proceedings are made public on television. A Voice could be a Senate enquiry or r royal commission on steroids, running 24/7 365 days a year, bringing to the public issues that are normally sequestered in the halls of power.
Out of sight out of mind.
A Voice would make the leaders accountable for a change. In the normal run of things their subalterns are the ones who are accountable, and who must reconcile the actual needs of FN communities with official policy. In general, these two things will be at loggerheads as top managers try to impose government policy on people who have no need for it.
A Voice could potentially give front-line workers the ability to funnel their accumulated learnings into policy, by showing how the things they’re been asking their managers for for years are actually in the best interests of the FN communities and, by extension – because we all want to see those Close the Gap benchmarks improve – of the country as a whole.
A Voice is the only way to make this happen. It will act like a permanent TV channel directing important FN debates into the newspapers and onto the TV screens of millions of voters and taxpayers around the country. There is no better solution to Indigenous disadvantage than such a feed of worthwhile information.
